Inspiration
There are many softwares that rank professors that teach a specific class that may give some insight into how a course may be. But none of them are tailored to the actual course itself. Say a student wanted to take a specific physics course but wanted to know if they really should buy the brutally expensive textbook. Or suppose they wanted to gauge how much time it takes a first-time learner to fully grasp the material so that they can make sure they aren’t stressing their workload. All this information is usually either scattered around on different forums or not within the scope of other rating applications.
What it does
Login page creates a unique account after which we are taked to the search screen where you submit a query and all relevant courses and reviews pop-up. The preview course card display a preview review to the course. You can expand the course card to access the full review that a user submitted by clicking on the card. You can return to the preview via a back button. For support and a little about you we have different navigations on the bottom of the screen as well as a profile section that includes your login information. The last page is the ‘Add Review’ page which is where you can submit a review on any subject of your choosing. Submitting this form automatically creates a new course card under that subject.
How we built it
This was built in Android Studio using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Github was utilized for version control.
Challenges we ran into
Challenges we ran into included figuring out how to properly implement databases into our program so that information could be stored. We were able to solve this issue through utilizing Android’s developer reference guide as well as getting help from mentors. Additionally, one of our team members was not familiar with using Android development or Jetpack Compose/Kotlin, but we were able to find guides on the basics of Jetpack and Kotlin so she could familiarize herself and contribute.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Android development has transitioned from using Java/XML to Jetpack Compose/Kotlin in recent years, so we’re proud of our team for working through the new coding syntax and programming an app with several screens and components. Additionally, we managed to work through integrating new technology such as a Firebase Firestore database to our app and completed the main functionalities we aimed to during the hacking period.
What we learned
It was some of our members’ first time working on the same codebase concurrently, so learning the Git commands for creating separate work branches and resolving merge conflicts was a great takeaway.
What's next for Course Expert
To make this accessible to all audiences, we wanted to run a sentiment analysis when reviews are placed in. This is basically to filter through responses to prevent spam reviews or take away any inappropriate responses. Another accessibility addition was to create this app to read in multiple languages using a Translation API so that we can not only reach a larger user audience but also get more diverse reactions to a course.
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